Dateline: Lake Geneva
September 27, 2017

Opinion/Editorial

 WE ARE WITH CHILD

One of the most interesting and informative pursuits of being human is to sit down, contemplate, and then attempt to take in the enormity of man’s inhumanity to man, from the slightest of circumstance all the way up to the dropping of hydrogen bombs on one another. I wrote an article about ‘turning the other cheek’ and following the New Testament philosophy last week. I wrote of the evil living among us and how it could be pushed back and accommodated while not having to engage in nasty acts ourselves, and therefore becoming like that insidious but persistent evil. Much of what comes under the umbrella of that dark word is difficult to label or even understand.

Take the likely new repeal of Obamacare. Kids with pre-existing conditions are simply to be discarded and not covered. Children? Even adults with such loosely defined ‘conditions,’ who have little money, get to live in misery and die because of a lack of premium paying capability? One might ask oneself what kind of monsters vote for stuff like that? The answer is easy. The ‘monsters’ who are so distanced from the main mass of mankind, and rich themselves, that they not only don’t see the injustice and heartless nature of such actions, but also never have to deal with any results from such awful behavior. Will God take on Lindsay Graham’s soul and have him stand there at the Pearly Gates to be judged and sent down? No decent God could pass him into heaven. Why is Lindsay, using him as only one example because he proposed the bill to cut children out, not thinking about how he is now old enough to be approaching the time when he will transition from this life to the next. Is a man like that considering the hereafter? Or doesn’t he really believe in such things? How is it that the American culture professes a majority belief in the New Testament of the bible while its actions are almost totally mired down in the Old Testament?

The entire issue of whether children will be cut out and selected against in our health care, regardless of their origin, is being fought over in the nation’s congressional houses as you read this. And it’s really not about the exercise of evil. It’s about perspective, competition and the division of assets. It’s long been said that there is only so much to go around. That phrase has been used since the dawn of time to allow some people to have something, and other people other things. But, like with children receiving treatment when they might have a pre-existing condition, the truth runs a lot deeper that any simply one-word explanation, like ‘evil,’ will allow for. When one person receives something that is denied to someone else, the logic of that expression is hard to overcome unless one considers the overwhelming abundance and wealth of the American culture today. There is, in fact, enough of just about everything to go around. That knowledge, and an understanding that everything is still viciously fought over no matter how much of it there is. Why?

Competition.

Once survival needs are met then human beings naturally compete for preferred conditions to survive in. This natural, and mostly denied, condition is what causes so much of society’s strife today, and back through time. If this competition was not right here, nakedly in front of us, then there would be no first class seats on passenger planes. Everyone’s going to the same place. The conditions in first class are little better than economy. Most first class passengers aren’t even there because they paid more for a ticket. They’re there because of the competition. For that brief period of time, the flight to wherever the plane is going, they won. They beat the competition. And that is okay. But when it comes to other things, like the care and keeping of the world’s children, this competitive streak of not wanting to distribute stuff because there’s not enough to go around, needs to be brought right up to the top of the table and discussed for what it is.

Denying children medical treatment is evil. Always.

~~~ James Strauss